Grewal, Inderpal

Inderpal Grewal is Chair and Professor in the Women’s, Gender
and Sexuality Studies Program; Faculty in the South Asia Council and the Ethnicity,
Race and Migration Studies Program; and Affiliate Faculty in American Studies
and Anthropology at Yale University. She is author of Home and Harem:
Nation, Gender, Empire and Cultures of Travel (Duke, 1996), Transnational
America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms (Duke, 2005), and Saving
the Security State: Exceptional Citizens in Twenty-first century America (Duke,
2017). She is co-editor (with Caren Kaplan) of Scattered Hegemonies:
Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices (University of
Minnesota Press, 1995), Introduction to Women’s Studies: Gender in a
Transnational World (Mc-Graw Hill, 2001, 2005) and (with Victoria Bernal) of
Theorizing NGO’s: Feminism, Neoliberalism and the State (Duke, 2014).
Her areas of research include feminist theory, cultural studies of South Asia
and its diasporas, British and U.S. imperialism, and global feminist movements.

On Rorotoko:

The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009

[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011